New applications are continually being added to mobile electronic devices. For example, various mobile devices now include a camera unit. These camera units use a flash, such as a Light Emitting Diode (LED) camera flash, which requires a large amount of camera flash current under certain situations. Since the mobile device is battery-powered, it is important to control the amount of current used by the camera flash because the camera flash current may result in “brown out” of the mobile device under certain conditions since there are other system loads that can occur when the camera flash is active. Brown out, also known as battery droop, means that the battery voltage drops to a level that can impair the operation of other device functions and possibly even cause the device to reset.
Most of the factors that affect brown out are not generally known to the user at the time of device operation, e.g., battery parameters, device load size and camera flash load size. Accordingly, conventional techniques assume a worst-case voltage drop when deciding whether to activate the camera flash while at the same time avoiding brown out. However, using a worst-case voltage drop limits the usefulness of the camera flash; i.e., the camera flash won't trigger sometimes even though the device could support a camera flash pulse without encountering brown out or reset.